Have you guys ever actually asked for a raise?Every company I've been at gives annual ones that depend on a frustrating matrix of your performance (which you control), the performance of your division (which you may control but probably don't), and the performance of the company (which about 3 people control, and you probably think they're greedy idiots.) The average across corporate was usually 3%. I got 8% one year, which was nice. Our bonus was also tied to it, and the year I got 8% the company hadn't done well so my bonus was capped at 50% of what it should have been. I learned not to factor bonus into wages after that.

Otherwise, I just jump companies. Often. Last time I jumped I got a $50k raise, which was and is still mindblowing. My boss at the time looked at me and asked if I'd be willing to listen to a counter offer and I just looked at him with pity and tried not to laugh.

Julio wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 11:48:Someone at Adobe needs to go to jail. Hopefully they get sued for this at a minimum.

Jail? For what?

For scraping data off people's hard drives that has nothing to do with Adobe i.e. ebooks purchased elsewhere. The EULA for the software apparently doesn't allow for this; though Adobe's put something additional on their website which may or may not.

I'm sure if I put out a program that scraped hard drives for personal information, I'd end up in jail.

What they're doing is wrong, but it isn't scraping a hard drive.Scraping a hard drive is data mining a hard drive. They're just data mining something read using their software. Entirely different.

DangerDog wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 18:54:The "bazillion guns" thing was sort of interesting in the beginning but it's actually become a major factor of annoyance, you get a cool gun that you like and have to keep checking if the gun in the loot chest is better than the one you have. There should have been a system where you could absorb XP into your gun from other weapons and sort of craft your own crazy concoctions.

I ended up glitching the inventory system so that I could have way more guns to choose from than you really would ever need, selling them takes away the ability to switch out to something you find but might want to use at some point, maybe it's better against robots than humans for example.

This just doesn't grab me as a new enough setting or game to warrant the $60 price tag, and they're already shilling DLC before the game is even out. Buy the "Season Pass" but don't expect all the dlc made for the game to be included. That was rather off putting from the last one.

I like the idea of upgrades. Guns have different components:1) Barrel, which controls primarily accuracy2) Uh, main thing, which controls primarily power3) Scope/sights, which control primarily zoom4) Magazine, which controls primarily capacity5) Something else, which controls primarily effect (e.g., fire)

I say "primarily" because some things would give you no reason to upgrade. If a magazine was solely capacity, you'd either start with 1 shot at a time or you'd finish with 1000, so you need it to also either have an upper limit on power, or it also feeds into power so that it gets outdated at some point. Planned obsolescence.

I was fine with the bazillion guns, but it became too hard to figure out if the gun in your hand was better than the gun you found. I had friends that looked solely at power, but there were other factors and no easy way to compare. No easy formula to work out in your head (which makes some sense, because some of it is variable), and testing on the dummies would tell you if something was way more powerful or weak than expected, but not tell you about things that were close. In the long run, though, doing 500dps and 515dps is probably not a big enough difference to care.

Seriously, we see these kinds of conspiracy theories all the time, yet no one can ever connect that dot. Why would Bethesda bother making a PC port just to make it intentionally bad so people buy it on consoles? What do they gain? Why would they just not release a PC port? The game is $60 on each platform. On consoles the game needs to be physically printed and distributed, the retail channel needs its cut, and the hardware manufacturer takes its cut. On PC, Steam takes its cut and that's it.

Beamer wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 13:08:We should applaud this. Frames per second are hardly the only judge of whether a game is good or not.

Different scenes have different levels of complexity, especially in a game like survival horror. For a huge chunk of the game you're walking down a narrow hallway with nothing going on. A good system can pump out tons of frames. Suddenly you hit a scene where hell breaks loose. Any system will take a sudden frame hit.Which a player can notice.

So lock the framerate to the lowest likely framerate the game will run at and we should applaud that? I don't think so, try harder to improve the performance then I'll applaud.

Some things are more valuable than frames per second.Sorry, doing a blanket "more frames are always better" doesn't hold, because frames are sacrificed for other things.

Having a constant 30 FPS with no slowdowns is the best option when you are going for a cinematic experience.

The best option when going for a cinematic experience is to go to a fucking cinema.

One of the harshest criticisms which may be levied against a movie is that it is "like watching a video game." Well I got news for you, that's a two way street; if a game developer wants to make a "cinematic experience" they're in the wrong fucking business.

No hardware can run all software at 60fps. It's a physical impossibility. Developers have to make tradeoffs to get frames per second, and sometimes those tradeoffs aren't worth the extra frames, so they're sacrificed.

You're absolutely right. The only problem with that argument is Evil Within looks like shit. Not only that, but the ONLY OTHER games running id Tech 5 run at sixty fucking frames a second, ON CONSOLES.

Oh, I totally agree it looks like shit, and I doubt it's doing much complex processing other than graphics.

theyarecomingforyou wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 13:16:I figured as much. Not only can I tell the difference between 720p and 1080p but I can also tell the difference between various levels of compression. I try to avoid watching movies on satellite because the compression is really apparent.

You might not be able to tell the difference between various resolutions or framerates but many of us can and we don't appreciate bullshit console ports being passed off as arty design decisions.

Levels of compression are easy to tell. Artifacting, or simply losing detail in dark areas. Watching Snowpiercer via my cablebox was annoying because there was no fidelity in the dark, and so much of the movie is in the dark.

1080p and 720p, though, is physically impossible at certain distances depending upon screen size, and most people tend to sit beyond those distances. Most. Not all. Most.

There is no excuse for targeting 30fps on PC. I don't have a problem with a 'cinematic mode' that limits the aspect ratio and framerate but that should be optional. The game should be designed to use the full screen resolution and support 60fps minimum.

This is clearly a console port.

every game does not need to run at 250 fps or even 60 fps. A survival horror game is a certain kind of game. Having a constant 30 FPS with no slowdowns is the best option when you are going for a cinematic experience. Especially Survival horror. Everything is slower and more deliberate in these games.

This is what the GAME DESIGNER chose for the GAME EXPERIENCE. He's not making a game thinking about all the whiney ass spoiled 4 year old my ice cream is cold and I have the depth of a mud puddle in Arizona PC forum poster.

I'm sorry but you are so wrong. No game designer chooses 30 fps. They only go that route when they cannot get higher frame rates from their engine and the hardware it's running on. Every game designer knows about human visual perception and 60 fps is always better than 30. This has been tested so many times and the myth of 30 fps has been debunked so many times that its tiring. Soon you will tell me that we use only x% of our brain.

You're right, to an extent.No hardware can run all software at 60fps. It's a physical impossibility. Developers have to make tradeoffs to get frames per second, and sometimes those tradeoffs aren't worth the extra frames, so they're sacrificed.

We should applaud this. Frames per second are hardly the only judge of whether a game is good or not.

So the argument, then, is why limit a game to a certain number of frames rather than let a system run it as best as it can?Obvious answer: because you can tell the difference between 60fps and 30fps.Different scenes have different levels of complexity, especially in a game like survival horror. For a huge chunk of the game you're walking down a narrow hallway with nothing going on. A good system can pump out tons of frames. Suddenly you hit a scene where hell breaks loose. Any system will take a sudden frame hit.Which a player can notice.

When you lock to 30fps, you basically assume the same frame rate for the entire experience, and no sudden jumps or dips. It also gives the developers a lot of room to add more detail to scenes, particularly quiet ones, because they know the CPU/GPU won't be taxed too hard, trying to push out significant frames, so they can put more into each frame.

Saboth wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 11:01:I got about 45% through the first one. I do love dungeon crawlers, but I've always disdained copious puzzles. I like fighting, getting loot, figuring out battles, not pulling 10 chains in various sequences to get a door to open, or stepping on 15 teleporters for an hour. I know, I know, Eye of the Beholder, et. al. had them, and I hated them back then too.

That goes for me as well. Never finished it for the same reason.

I didn't even make it that far. The movement being tiled and around 90 degree angles just put me off.

Like Saboth said, I know it's a throwback and how games used to be, but we also used to not know better, understand things were limitations we don't have now, plus back then for much of us when we bought a game that was it for a period of time. Today, if a game doesn't catch me I still have about 300 or 400 unplayed Steam games and a dozen or two unplayed console games to check out.

I know it's unfair, but this game just seemed like a ton of fun for five minutes but then felt like I was fighting the game rather than playing it.

I was kind of with you until this last line. One of my biggest gripes with game reviews these days is that so many of them fail to mention porting problems. The better ones always do, but there are lots that don't.

A lot of big sites just copy-and-paste, only mentioning something platform specific if it's extremely special or dire.

Which always sucks. Adding a simple paragraph to the bottom explaining any differences, or saying "no differences between platforms" seems easy and useful.

Are those really ads, though?I mean, does that make the front page of Steam 100% ads? It's all "ads" for games and DLC. I guess I should burn Steam? I mean, they already take 30% of my purchase, now they feel they should advertise the things they sell to me so I'm aware they exist?!

I find, say, the ads on Xbox for a Chevy Malibu annoying. But if it's something you can actually buy via Xbox I don't see how it's bad. It's like walking into a supermarket and seeing a display showing you bananas are $0.69 per pound and yelling "ALL THESE ADS! I'M TAKING MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE!"

Prez wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 12:10:I never understand the "you can use an unsupported fix" crowd excusing shoddy porting. Yes I can use a few console commands or make some config.ini changes, but "unsupported" means if it doesn't work or if screws your game up it's basically 'tough shit'. I like that the flexibility to utilize such things exists to be sure but I'm not too keen on the idea that developers are relying on it like they seem to be.

Leaving it in there usually means it probably won't mess your game up, though. It might, and they're not going to take the QA time to find out for sure, but it probably won't.

If it probably would, they just wouldn't include it because more headaches will come with including a gamebreaking option than in just not including it at all.

So yeah, it may screw things up, but the fact that they're including it means they're pretty certain it won't.

jacobvandy wrote on Oct 9, 2014, 10:13:I have no issue with a developer making a SURVIVAL HORROR game that is targeting 30 fps and 2.35:1 for aesthetic purposes. They're giving you the option to bypass those choices yourself, yet you still bitch and moan?

Cutter wrote on Oct 8, 2014, 20:36:Broads shouldn't be in charge of tech companies. But if you're going to do it regardless, at least put one in who isn't a bean counter. Smooth move Ex-Lax! Nice play, Shakespeare!